Queen Fabiola of the Belgians - obituary

Queen Fabiola of the Belgians was a Spanish aristocrat who was working as a
nurse when she was secretly selected as a royal bride

Queen Fabiola in 1963Photo: REX FEATURES

7:33PM GMT 05 Dec 2014

Queen Fabiola of the Belgians, who has died aged 86, had one of the most unlikely royal courtships of modern times when an Irish nun was sent on a secret mission in the 1950s to find a suitable bride for King Baudouin I.

The only unmarried child of a wealthy Spanish aristocrat, Fabiola was working as a nurse in Madrid and living in her own apartment when Sister Veronica O’Brien arrived in Spain at the behest of the future Cardinal Suenens, then auxiliary bishop of Malenes. Suenens was concerned that the King, who had been on the throne for nine years and was deeply religious, was lonely and needed a wife; and when Baudouin met Sister Veronica he confided to her that he wished to marry a devout Catholic — preferably Spanish and aristocratic.

After consulting Fabiola’s headmistress in Madrid, who thought that her former pupil might help to find a candidate among the unmarried daughters of her friends, Sister Veronica was duly introduced. She decided that she need look no further, reporting to Suenens that Avila (their code name for Fabiola) “came in like a breath of fresh air, tall, thin, well-built, good-looking and striking, bubbling with life, intelligence and energy”.

The nun invited Fabiola to stay with her in Brussels, where she met the King. Then, when Fabiola returned to Madrid, Sister Veronica followed with a letter from Suenens, urging her to marry Baudouin. Fabiola fell into a rage, but eventually calmed down and agreed to return to Brussels, where Baudouin came to meet her secretly. The couple became close when they sheltered from the rain and said the rosary together in his car during a visit to Lourdes. Fabiola duly accepted his proposal, hours before the King was called back to Belgium by the crisis in the Congo.

Years later King Baudoin wrote in his diary: “Thank you Lord, for having given me Fabiola as my wife and Veronica as my guardian angel.”

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Fabiola Fernanda Maria de las Victorias Antonia Adélaïda Mora y Aragon was born in Madrid on June 11 1928. She was sixth of the seven children of Don Gonzalo Mora y Fernández, Conde de Mora and Marqués de Casa Riera, and his wife, Doña Blanca de Aragon y Carillo de Albornoz. Fabiola’s father was one of Spain’s largest landowners and lived in a palace with a marble façade in Madrid . There were 17 servants who were required to join the family every evening to recite the rosary. In addition, Fabiola was a god-daughter of Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain (the wife of King Alfonso XIII and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria).

When King Alfonso was forced to flee Spain in 1931, the family moved between Paris, the Basque country and Switzerland. As befitted a girl of her class, Fabiola received a serious and highly cultured education. Their exile ended in 1939, when they returned to Madrid to retrieve their palace, then sporting a red flag as the headquarters of the women revolutionaries.

Fabiola trained as a nurse in military hospitals in Madrid and San Sebastian. She published a children’s book, The Twelve Marvellous Tales, the royalties from which eventually went to the National Society for Children.

By the mid-1950s all Fabiola’s siblings were married, and after rejecting an aristocratic Spanish suitor as not sufficiently serious, she resigned herself to a life of spinsterhood, dining every night at the family palace which, since her father’s death, had become a shrine to his memory with 50 stray dogs roaming the garden.

King Baudoin and Queen Fabiola of Belgium at a gala in Mexico City in 1965 (REX FEATURES)

In Belgium, the young King Baudouin also had a complicated family background. His grandfather, King Albert, had died in a climbing accident when he was three, and his mother, Queen Astrid, was killed in a car accident when he was four. During the Second World War his father, King Leopold III, was spirited away as a prisoner of war while Baudouin and his younger brother, Albert (who reigned as King Albert II from his brother’s death in 1993 until abdicating in 2013 in favour of his son Philippe), and their sister, the late Grand Duchess Josephine Charlotte of Luxembourg, were kept in seclusion until liberated by the American army in 1945.

After his father’s second marriage, to Liliane Baels (later known as the Princesse de Réthy), the Belgian people were not pleased, and Baudouin found himself King at 21, after Leopold’s abdication. During the 1950s Baudouin was so close to his stepmother as to give grave concern to some of his ministers. He considered being King a vocation similar to that of a priest, but after his brother Albert married he became preoccupied by the need to marry and continue his line.

When the marriage took place in Brussels on December 1 1960, Fabiola wore a gown hemmed with white fur by Balenciaga. Princess Margaret represented the British Royal family at the ceremony.

As in all families, there was a black sheep, and in Fabiola’s case it was her brother, Jaime Mora y Aragon, a playboy who, in contrast to the austere simplicity of his sister’s life, was a familiar feature at the Marbella Club in Spain; he was not invited to the wedding.

Strains also existed within the Belgian royal family. Fabiola disliked her husband’s stepmother on sight, a feeling that was reciprocated. When the King and Queen returned from their honeymoon, they found that King Leopold, Princess Liliane and their three children had vacated the palace in their absence, taking their furniture and pictures with them.

King Baudouin never forgave his stepmother for this slight, and the only times they met after this were at the funeral of his grandmother, Queen Elisabeth, in 1965, and of his father in 1983, when Fabiola held Liliane’s arm supportively during the service.

Queen Fabiola of Belgium in 1960 (GETTY / PHOTONEWS)

King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola proved a popular couple, noted for their quiet dedication to Belgium and the Belgian people; for their staunch Roman Catholicism; and, more poignantly, for their many attempts to have children, all of which ended sadly. Queen Fabiola was also known for her charitable work and for her discreet elegance, being dressed in the smartest of haute couture, notably by Chanel.

The King and Queen travelled extensively. They paid a state visit to Britain in 1963, Baudouin being appointed a Knight of the Garter, and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh paid a return state visit in 1966. Relations between the Queen and the Belgian couple were strong, and Baudouin’s was the only funeral of a foreign monarch she has ever attended in person during her long reign.

Fabiola devoted her life to charitable work, and to cultural activities in Belgium, attending concerts, artistic performances and lectures. She was especially interested in the welfare of children, and set up a special secretariat at the royal palace to deal with issues concerned with handicapped children. At Laeken, one of the royal residences, the King and Queen built a wooden chalet, where Fabiola cooked and Baudouin washed up. As a nephew put it: “She adored him as if he was a living god on a pedestal.”

It was a particular sadness for them that they remained childless. Pope John XXIII astonished the world by announcing that Fabiola was pregnant during the Belgian couple’s visit to the Vatican in June 1961. Two weeks later she miscarried. In 1962 she was delivered of a stillborn child after a four-month pregnancy, at which point a Swiss gynaecologist told her that she had only a 10 per cent chance of carrying a baby to full term, and herself a five per cent chance of surviving.

The King and Queen made pilgrimages to Assisi and Lourdes, praying for a child, but Fabiola miscarried again in 1963. In 1966, and again in 1968, a baby died in her womb. After that they became resigned to having no children, but were sustained by their faith. Having no children brought them sympathy in their country, where the Belgian people considered them as symbols of parenthood to the nation.

In 1979 King Baudouin told some Belgian youngsters: “You know that we are childless. For many years we struggled to fathom the meaning of this sorrow. But gradually we came to understand that, having no children ourselves, we have more room in our hearts to love all, truly all, children.”

Queen Fabiola in 2004 (REX FEATURES)

When the Belgian government wanted to pass a law liberalising abortion in Belgium in 1990, the King felt so strongly against this that he asked the government to declare him temporarily unfit to reign so that he did not have to give the bill the Royal Assent. This was agreed, and afterwards he resumed the throne. King Baudouin died suddenly of heart failure at his villa in Spain on July 31 1993, and Queen Fabiola attended the funeral dressed in white. Afterwards she thanked the Belgian people for their response to his death, and moved out of the royal palace.

Queen Fabiola remained popular during her years of widowhood, although in 2013 she was accused of using a foundation to avoid death duties. She was always included in state ceremonies by King Albert and Queen Paola, appearing between them on the balcony on the day that Albert was invested as King.

Queen Fabiola of the Belgians, born June 11 1928, died December 5 2014